Below premieres on Netflix in six days, and a new batch of images from the six-episode limited series is out ahead of it. Josh Hartnett plays a Newfoundland fisherman losing a fight on two fronts: an industry dying on its own, and something in the water speeding the process up.
All six episodes land October 8. The trailer arrived last month and kept the creature off screen the whole way through. Holding it back this long is a bet that the town is interesting enough on its own.
The Penneys Take Up Most of the Call Sheet
Hartnett plays Calvin Penney. Charlie Heaton plays his son Wade, Willow Kean plays Ruth and Ruby Stokes plays Mary, and Rohan Campbell plays Jay. Mackenzie Davis is the outsider in the cast list: Fonda Howander, a marine researcher who arrives to work out what is doing the killing.
Heaton is still best known to horror viewers from Stranger Things, and Campbell played Corey Cunningham in Halloween Ends. Mary Walsh, a fixture of Canadian television, plays Linda. The new images span the full run, with frames from the first episode through the sixth, so the series is not holding back its back half from press.
Newfoundland Is Not a Backdrop Here
Creator and showrunner Jesse McKeown, who wrote on The Umbrella Academy, set the series somewhere he already knew. “I’ve been coming to Newfoundland for many years, and it’s become a part of my life,” he said, calling it “a great place for something big and something kind of epic.” The production shot on location rather than standing in somewhere cheaper, and the trailer shows it.
Hartnett signed on quickly. “I read the first two scripts in less than an hour,” he said. “The voice was so clear, the concept was so engaging.”
Six Episodes, One Drop
Netflix is putting all six episodes out at once on October 8 rather than spacing them weekly, which suits a creature story better than it suits a mystery. The service files Below under thriller, which is a shelving decision more than a description, and it arrives on a Netflix horror shelf that has been unusually crowded this month.
The creature is still the thing nobody outside the production has seen. Six hours is a long stretch to keep a monster off screen, and the campaign has spent every frame so far doing exactly that.